This blog contains posts by the Microsoft Dynamics AX Support Teams Worldwide

AX Content: Select invoices to pay

Pay bills! It’s one of the most important financial functions for an organization. A solid vendor payment process helps you stay on good terms with your vendors, while making the best use of your organization’s cash.

In this post, we’ll look at three ways to select invoices to pay in Microsoft Dynamics AX. The three ways are to select individual vendors and invoices, use a payment proposal, and use centralized payments.

Select individual vendors and invoices

If you know who you need to pay and which invoices you want to pay, you can use the Settle open transactions form in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 to settle the invoices with payments.

1. Click Accounts payable > Journals > Payments > Payment journal.

2. Create a payment journal, and then click Lines to open the Journal voucher form.

3. Create a new line and select a vendor account.

4. Click Functions > Settlement to open the Settle open transactions form. This form displays all the open transactions (invoices, credit notes, and other payments) for the selected vendor.

5. In the Mark column, select the invoices that you want to pay, and then close the form.

Depending on your organization’s business practices, you might enter the payment amount in the Journal voucher form before you select the invoices, or you can let AX 2012 automatically calculate the payment amount based on the invoice amounts. After you select the invoices, you might need to submit the payment journal to workflow before you can post the journal.

NOTE: In previous releases of Microsoft Dynamics AX, the Settle open transactions form was called Open transaction editing.

Use a payment proposal

Selecting individual invoices to pay is fine for one-off payments or low volumes of payments. But if you’re paying several hundred invoices at a time, it’s more efficient to use a payment proposal. A payment proposal is a query that finds all the invoices that are due, that have a cash discount available, or both. After you run the proposal (query), you can review the list of invoices and remove any that you don’t want to pay at that time.

1. Click Accounts payable > Journals > Payments > Payment journal.

2. Create a payment journal, and then click Lines to open the Journal voucher form.

3. Click Payment proposal > Create payment proposal.

4. In the Proposal type field, select whether to query by due date, by discount date, or both.

5. Enter other criteria for the query, and then click OK. The Vendor payment proposal form displays the results of the query. Click Transfer to transfer the lines to the Journal voucher form.

6. In the Journal voucher form, you can delete the lines for any invoices that you don’t want to pay.

Use centralized payments

In organizations that have more than one legal entity, you might have a shared services group that pays all invoices on behalf of the other legal entities. In this case, you’ll pay vendors from the legal entity of the payment, and you’ll use centralized payments functionality to select the legal entity of the invoice. In most cases, you’ll probably use a payment proposal to select invoices to pay.

In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, you use virtual companies to specify the companies that can be used for centralized payments. In Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012, you must set up an organizational hierarchy that has a purpose of Centralized payments, instead. For more information, see How to use organization hierarchy purposes.

For more information about centralized payments in AX 2012, see the following topics: